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Stochastic approximation (SA) and stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithms are work-horses for modern machine learning algorithms. Their constant stepsize variants are preferred in practice due to fast convergence behavior. However,…
Sparsity regularized loss minimization problems play an important role in various fields including machine learning, data mining, and modern statistics. Proximal gradient descent method and coordinate descent method are the most popular…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a widely adopted iterative method for optimizing differentiable objective functions. In this paper, we propose and discuss a novel approach to scale up SGD in applications involving non-convex functions…
First-order optimization (FOO) algorithms are pivotal in numerous computational domains such as machine learning and signal denoising. However, their application to complex tasks like neural network training often entails significant…
Due to its simplicity and outstanding ability to generalize, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is still the most widely used optimization method despite its slow convergence. Meanwhile, adaptive methods have attracted rising attention of…
Optimizing smooth convex functions in stochastic settings, where only noisy estimates of gradients and Hessians are available, is a fundamental problem in optimization. While first-order methods possess a low per-iteration cost, their…
This paper studies distributed nonconvex optimization problems with stochastic gradients for a multi-agent system, in which each agent aims to minimize the sum of all agents' cost functions by using local compressed information exchange. We…
Modern GPUs are equipped with large amounts of high-bandwidth memory, enabling them to support mini-batch sizes of up to tens of thousands of training samples. However, most existing optimizers struggle to perform effectively at such a…
We analyze stochastic gradient algorithms for optimizing nonconvex problems. In particular, our goal is to find local minima (second-order stationary points) instead of just finding first-order stationary points which may be some bad…
Iterative algorithms are ubiquitous in the field of data mining. Widely known examples of such algorithms are the least mean square algorithm, backpropagation algorithm of neural networks. Our contribution in this paper is an improvement…
In this work we investigate the practicality of stochastic gradient descent and recently introduced variants with variance-reduction techniques in imaging inverse problems. Such algorithms have been shown in the machine learning literature…
We consider learning problems over training sets in which both, the number of training examples and the dimension of the feature vectors, are large. To solve these problems we propose the random parallel stochastic algorithm (RAPSA). We…
The recent advancement of foundation models (FMs) has brought about a paradigm shift, revolutionizing various sectors worldwide. The popular optimizers used to train these models are stochastic gradient descent-based algorithms, which face…
First-order stochastic methods for solving large-scale non-convex optimization problems are widely used in many big-data applications, e.g. training deep neural networks as well as other complex and potentially non-convex machine learning…
Applications such as unbalanced and fully shuffled regression can be approached by optimizing regularized optimal transport (OT) distances, such as the entropic OT and Sinkhorn distances. A common approach for this optimization is to use a…
This paper formalizes and analyzes Gaussian smoothing applied to two prominent optimization methods: Stochastic Gradient Descent (GSmoothSGD) and Adam (GSmoothAdam) in deep learning. By attenuating small fluctuations, Gaussian smoothing…
Stochastic gradient method (SGM) has been popularly applied to solve optimization problems with objective that is stochastic or an average of many functions. Most existing works on SGMs assume that the underlying problem is unconstrained or…
Variance reduction has been commonly used in stochastic optimization. It relies crucially on the assumption that the data set is finite. However, when the data are imputed with random noise as in data augmentation, the perturbed data set…
We present a stochastic descent algorithm for unconstrained optimization that is particularly efficient when the objective function is slow to evaluate and gradients are not easily obtained, as in some PDE-constrained optimization and…
Simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation (SPSA) is widely used in stochastic optimization due to its high efficiency, asymptotic stability, and reduced number of required loss function measurements. However, the standard SPSA…